trauma

12 Days of Girly Juice 2022: 6 Journal Entries

Kate Sloan

Dear friends, I didn’t write in my journal much this year; one of the occupational hazards of being someone who writes for a living is that sometimes you don’t have enough time/energy to write for yourself. A lot of the writing I did do in my journal was the many many pages of notes I tend to take during solo shrooms trips; usually I put on a movie (or sometimes 2-3 in a row) and sit in front of it with my Moleskine and pen, noting all the thoughts and feelings that come up as I watch Hercules or A Bug’s Life or Cats Don’t Dance or whatever.

So, some of the journal entries I’m sharing in this post are extremely condensed/curated excerpts from those trip notes, and some are just regular journal entries about thoughts and feelings I was having at the time. A lot of these entries also contain reference to the trauma healing work I’ve been doing this year in Internal Family Systems therapy. I hope you enjoy, and that you’re having a good December.

 

March 12th

Some notes from a solo shrooms trip:

All of us (all the “parts” of me) can rally together inside. Working collaboratively on a big task (like healing trauma) inherently builds intimacy. And hopefully trust. Like how Chuck Nolan (in the movie Cast Away) needed to be the guy looking for rope and also the guy who sent him to look. It can save your sanity to be multiple selves.

No one’s there to care for you if you’re just alone. You have to be able to split yourself, see yourself and your life from two angles at once, yours and hers (your inner child’s). It’s the only way you both can be cared for, protected and healed. The way I “trip-sit” myself is such good training for being simultaneously the passenger and the captain. It needs to become almost instinctual, like psychological muscle memory, for me to separate from and care for my inner bbgirl like this.

The hardest part is realizing: as a kid, you thought adults had all the answers and were never afraid, but in reality, you can be afraid and only know what you know and still decide to helm the ship. Having to calm her helps summon the most adult, nurturing parts of me to the surface. I never need to worry I’m a bad “parent” to her as long as I am listening to her, affirming her feelings, and helping her do what she wants to do next.

I spent a lot of time alone in my room as a kid because I wouldn’t trigger myself, wouldn’t monitor my own behavior for badness, or yell at myself. It was very resourced of me to be in my room alone with books, journals, dolls/teddies/stuffed animals, music, my tape recorder, my cute clothes. I found peace in solitude. But crucially, this strategy REQUIRES that I only be nice to myself, and not be the exact kind of terrorizer that necessitated my self-regulating alone time.

 

April 14th

Free-writing because Matt told me to:

[My high school] was a place where queerness of all definitions was accepted and encouraged. It was in some ways a culture shock after 2 years at [my middle school], where social hierarchy mattered so primally, so fundamentally. What is it about middle school that brings out the meanest, darkest streaks in young people’s psychology? Is it the underformed prefrontal cortex, the impulse control issues, the lack of emotional experience that turns pimply dweebs into monsters?

There are two girls I regret having shunned and gossiped about rather than befriended in middle school. One was [N.], widely regarded as the sluttiest girl in school. We were all 12-14 years old, and there were constant rumors that [N.] dated men in their late teens or early twenties. I wonder now if she was okay, if those men were taking advantage of her; any way you slice it, they almost certainly were.

The other girl we were mean about was [K.]; she was meek but deeply funny when you got her going. She was into anime and other “nerdy” stuff like that. There were also constant rumors that she was a lesbian, and the popular girls would sometimes claim that she had been staring at them or making them feel uncomfortable. In retrospect, the homophobic anxiety was off the charts at that school, which made [my high school] seem even more utopian by contrast.

[My therapist] says it makes sense that I would latch onto the structure of “popularity” in order to prop up my damaged self-image after the emotional mistreatment I’d endured elsewhere. We naturally look for ways to feel more empowered when we go through a disempowering trauma – that’s how shame first evolves, as a way of coping with unpredictable dangers by positing that we can theoretically protect ourselves from those dangers if we behave a certain way because the problem is that we are bad – to believe otherwise would be to have to accept the terrifying truth that danger can strike at any time, for any reason, or for no reason at all.

So I can see why I got so obsessed with winning/maintaining the approval of [B., the most popular girl at my middle school] and her cronies, even though I didn’t even like them that much or want to be their friend for reasons other than social status and avoiding loneliness + ridicule. There were rules I could follow – I thought – that would help me stay safe: wear this brand of clothing, carry this type of purse, talk this way, mock these girls, express derision toward the “right” things (gayness, nerdiness, fatness, etc). I was trying to follow all the protocols and even that wasn’t enough, ultimately, to keep me safe from having my social status destroyed. But it was a lesson I needed to learn.

 

July 27th

Part of why this songwriting challenge has been so good for me is that I always wanted to do more gigs but so much of my best material (especially the more crowd-pleasing stuff) was from when I was in high school or my early twenties, and I feel like a pretty different person now, with different things to say and different feelings and stories I want to express (though some of the same ones as well). I’m really proud of the songs I’ve been cranking out this year and excited to have so much more stuff I can perform whenever that becomes a possibility again.

I’ve also loved observing how naturally well-suited my brain is for songwriting: little melodic, lyrical or conceptual ideas come to me all the time, like a tumbleweed blowing on down the road, and my job is to pick them up, examine them, shine ’em up and make ’em sparkle. My songwriting process now is much more adult and fleshed-out than when I was in high school, because 1) I’m a better writer now in general and 2) my spiritual beliefs around creativity now are less about accepting and reproducing exactly the rudimentary or strange ideas I hear in my head and more about using them like whispers from the universe, as a jumping-off point, an improv scene suggestion, a nudge in the direction I need to go in. I’m fascinated by the process of honing a metaphorical block of marble into a beautiful, compelling sculpture.

 

September 10th

Some notes from another shrooms trip:

3:07 p.m. Have to once again remind myself: you don’t need to narrate this or explain/describe your experience to ANYONE later, just enjoy it – BUT if imagining a future audience/listener is useful as a framing device or narrative theme, of course you can still use it when and if you want to.

3:15 p.m. Keeping grounded during scary scenes [of the movie I’m watching, Hercules] by writing about them. But is this always what I do? Distancing myself from the experience by documenting it? The loss of control/connection to reality that many people fear from drugs (myself included) is noticeably lurking around the edges but I am comfortably holding it off – the movie and writing about the movie are both pleasant.

3:26 p.m. Reality is bending and becoming less sure to me but in a way that’s still comfortable. Indeed, narrating this as if for a future reader (even if it’s only me) is a helpful organizing principle but also something I wouldn’t even know how to turn off in myself. What notes am I supposed to make in a NOTEbook if not for a future reader? Why am I shaming myself, bullying myself for a natural human impulse that has existed since the beginning of time itself? I am a creator, that is very core to who I am, and so parts of everything I do will be done creatively or as if they are meant to function as fuel or fodder for further creation. To pretend otherwise would be kidding myself.

4:12 p.m. Literally have no idea how many pages I’ve written this trip. The writing is less about its output and more about the actual action of it – it’s a guiding principle, a way of steering the ship, but also it is the ship.

 

October 29th

Some notes from yet another shrooms trip:

5:47 p.m. Watching [the YouTuber QuinBoBin] play Twilight Princess. I love him he’s so funny and wholesome. I’m laughing so hard that there are tears rolling down my cheeks.

Quin has taught me a lot about HOW TO ENJOY PLAYING VIDEO GAMES! This connection to my nerdy childhood. It’s like I was too scared of social self-judgment for being nerdy and I didn’t even let that path of my life develop. Reclaiming video games and other nerdy shit I was shamed out of. Being that nerdy boy I always wanted to impress and connect with.

5:57 p.m. VERY emotional. Shrooms is not easy or passive; do not expect it to be. But nothing is scary when I know Quin is here with me and we’re fighting the big boss together. I have to let the gay nerd inside me out. How much of my personality and style have I let [my middle school bully] shape? Who would I be without her laugh aimed at me in my own head? I’m mourning wasted time and who I could have been.

In the game Link transforms and I can transform too. I can be anything I want. My life is mine to craft now. Slicking my hair back with my tears lol.

I always used to run from Lynels [a difficult enemy in the game Breath of the Wild] or chip away at their ankles and Quin showed me I can fucking mount them and slap their cheeks til they’re dead. Nerdy boys showed me a way out of the hell of social hierarchy and I chose to swim away. I chose the hierarchy. Every mean thing I’ve ever done has been in service of trying to look cool and disaffected and like I had the upper hand. That was all an act, a crutch. I know that now.

6:21 p.m. What a wild drug, lol.

 

November 21st

Was just looking at some of Gaby Herstik’s incredible selfies and felt a strong sense of wanting to lean back into the side of me that would post provocative thirst traps on Twitter, dress slutty and weird every day, flirt with randos, etc. I think I have lost touch with that girl partly for reasonable reasons (fibro, pandemic, concerns about being kicked off PayPal/Instagram etc. for being too porny) and partly for dumb reasons (wanting to “seem more professional” and “be taken more seriously”). The disembodiment of trauma has also played a role.

But I wonder how much of feeling embodied and deliciously sensual is about making the effort to feel sexy by any means necessary: wearing lipstick and perfume to bed, posting late-night lingerie pics, upping my heart rate by telling cute people they’re cute.

Through therapy I have become aware of the aspects of my former sluttiness that I felt pressured into by society and people I’ve hooked up with, or felt lured into by my own trauma-borne desperation to be liked and wanted. But I wonder if now it’s time to let the pendulum swing back in the other direction a little, in the hopes of finding a happier medium. I want to feel even sexier in my thirties than I did in my twenties, and when I do, I will have earned it. This body, this confidence and this proud sexuality were hard-won for me and I intend to enjoy them. But in a way that respects my demisexuality, my trauma history and my boundaries.

During fibro flare-ups I feel so disconnected from my body even as the pains and discomforts of my body are all I can think about. I want to feel in touch with my body again and that includes being in touch with its softness, its sexiness, its allure to others and to myself.

12 Days of Girly Juice 2022: 8 Brilliant Books

Kate Sloan

Ever walked into a really great bookstore and felt a chill go up your spine that was almost erotic? Yeah, me too.

Gosh, I love books. I don’t know if I agree with John Waters’ famous quote on books, “If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ’em,” because people consume the written word in so many different mediums now – but I know that I’d be hesitant to date someone who couldn’t at least converse with me about the books we each enjoyed.

Goodreads tells me that I read about 31 books this year, and as is tradition, I’ve picked 8 of my favorites to tell you about. Here they are, in the order that I read them:

 

Missing from the Village: The Story of Serial Killer Bruce McArthur, the Search for Justice, and the System that Failed Toronto’s Queer Community by Justin Ling

Available at Bookshop.org and Amazon.com

I remember how it felt to be a member of Toronto’s queer community a few summers ago, when there were vague rumblings of a serial killer on the loose amongst us. Several people had disappeared mysteriously at gay bars and other areas in the Village, many of them queer men of color. The police didn’t seem to be doing anything about it, unsurprisingly. My queer friends and I would tell each other even more emphatically after nights out, “Text me when you get home safe, okay?” because we just didn’t know what was going on, and we were scared.

Through a series of events which are diligently described in this book, it was eventually discovered that the serial killer walking among us was a landscaper and former mall Santa who was targeting queer men of color, particularly those who were immigrants and whose far-away friends and family might not notice they’d gone missing. While the killer is in prison now, and will be until he’s at least 91 years old if he even lives that long, the damage he had done to our community, to his victims and to their friends and family was insurmountable and could never be taken back.

Justin Ling is a Canadian investigative journalist who took an interest in this story, and in this book he digs into what exactly happened, why police were so negligent in this case (hint: racism and homophobia were big factors, as you’d expect), and how the killer was identified and apprehended. It’s a fascinating and harrowing look into crimes that should never have been swept under the rug.

 

No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma & Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model by Richard C. Schwartz

Available at Bookshop.org and Amazon.com

I really can’t overstate how much Internal Family Systems therapy has helped me this last year. I had struggled for over a decade with managing the torrential emotions that would sweep over me whenever I got triggered, and IFS is the only modality that has given me tools which have actually helped with this problem. It has helped me learn to be more compassionate towards myself and others, and to comfort myself when I am upset in addition to asking for what I need from the people in my life.

Richard C. Schwartz is the inventor of Internal Family Systems. Trained in family therapy, he took his knowledge of dynamics amongst groups and couples and began using those same paradigms on the individual self, seeing each person as being made up of “parts” which have conflicting desires, fears, motivations and tactics. What all of these parts have in common, though, is that they all ultimately share the goal of keeping you safe and protecting you from difficult emotions – it’s just that they sometimes do this in ways that seem baffling or counterproductive. The “parts” inside a person who’s endured trauma, Schwartz says, are essentially just children, frozen in time at the point in your history when you experienced that trauma – so if you notice yourself feeling like a snivelling 6-year-old girl or a tantrum-throwing 8-year-old boy when you’re triggered, what is needed is the care and compassion you would show to an actual child of that age who was having that level of emotional response.

No Bad Parts is one of several books Schwartz has written about IFS, and it’s a good introduction to the model. I’d still recommend that beginners to IFS see a therapist trained in this modality if they’re at all able to, because it can be extremely helpful to have a calm, wise person steer the ship through your tumultuous emotions with you when you haven’t learned how to do so yourself yet. But even if you can’t access therapy, I still think this book could be transformational for many people. It certainly has been for me, by helping me understand better what my therapist is actually doing when they implement certain IFS techniques, and how I can implement those techniques myself when I’m alone.

 

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Available at Bookshop.org and Amazon.com

I picked this up because several people I follow online had mentioned that they “couldn’t put it down” once they started reading it. I literally didn’t know anything about it going into it, and that’s probably the ideal way to consume this book.

So how do I explain why I loved it so much, without giving spoilers? All I can really say is that if you’re a fan of old Hollywood – the movies, the celebrity culture, the glamour of it all – and are a romantic, you’d probably enjoy this, especially if you’re queer.

It made me want to wear a green satin ballgown every day. It made me want to pursue the things I want, and the people I want. It made me want to be the loudest, boldest, bravest version of myself, if just in honor of the people who came before me who weren’t able to do that. I loved it and cried through most of it, which (coming from me) is a huge compliment.

 

You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For: Bringing Courageous Love to Intimate Relationships by Richard C. Schwartz

Available at Bookshop.org and Amazon.com

I wasn’t sure whether to include another book I read by the Internal Family Systems founder about his therapeutic model, but honestly both of these books have changed my life so much that it would be weird not to mention them!

You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For is much more relationships-focused than No Bad Parts. In particular, a lot of it is about how trauma can make us more susceptible to viewing certain people as our “redeemer,” someone whose love will somehow “fix” us and make it so that we’re never sad or lonely or rejected ever again. This can be a highly damaging way to view your relationships, both for your loved ones and for yourself, and yet it’s how a lot of people think about love. It’s even how our culture encourages us to view love, if the many many media depictions of “romance = happily ever after” are to be believed.

This book discusses the ways that IFS techniques can be used to heal negative relationship patterns, like always trying to change a partner so they’ll be who you want them to be, or always trying to change yourself to fit what you think your partner wants. And although this book wasn’t written with polyamory or other forms of non-monogamy in mind, I think it dovetails nicely with a lot of resources on polyamory and trauma, because it can help you address the root causes of your strong reactions to jealousy, rejection, and the threat of abandonment.

 

Tampa by Alyssa Nutting

Available at Bookshop.org and Amazon.com

Someone described this book to me as “a gender-swapped Lolita” and I was intrigued. Lolita is one of my favorite novels, not just because the writing is beautifully lush and witty, and not just because it launched a thousand erotic tropes, but because of how skilfully it makes powerful statements about consent and control via its unreliable narrator Humbert Humbert. While often interpreted by critics as a defense of pedophiles and their crimes, I see Lolita far more as a warning to the world about what can happen when we trust “unreliable narrators” just because they’re male/white/well-to-do/[insert other markers of systemic power and privilege here]. Much like Missing from the Village, Lolita points out the ineptitudes of authority figures whose unexamined biases lead them to ignore, dismiss and belittle the disempowered people most in need of their help.

Tampa is indeed, in many ways, a gender-swapped Lolita. It’s a novel about an adult woman who is sexually fixated on young boys, and the lengths to which she will go to scratch her pedophilic itch. Like Lolita, it forces the reader to grapple with their own notions of consent, control, agency, desire, and justice. And also like Lolita, it encourages us to understand the problem of pedophilia from a more humanizing angle, without letting abusers off the hook for the terrible things they do.

While obviously quite disturbing, Tampa was a compelling read. I especially found it interesting to note the ways that women who abuse their power can so often be viewed as less of a threat than men who do the same, for obvious reasons, even though they can behave just as horribly and can be every bit as morally bankrupt as their male counterparts.

 

Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Available at Bookshop.org and Amazon.com

Since I enjoyed her previous book The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo so much, I decided to check out Taylor Jenkins Reid’s newer novel, Carrie Soto is Back. It’s about the comeback tour of a fictional female pro tennis player – why she decides to return to the game after some time away, and what happens when she does.

I’m not a sporty person at all, but some of my few forays into the land of athleticism have been into racquet sports, including tennis, badminton, and volleyball. So, while I found the athletic aspects of this book mildly interesting, mainly what pulled me in was the relationships between the characters, and the way that Carrie is so driven by her desire to be the best that she often ends up pushing people away and hurting herself in the process.

I think this story is instructive for anyone who measures their value by their professional success. I’ve certainly been there, and it was affirming to see those struggles reflected in these pages, even though Carrie is a world-famous tennis star who tours the world, and I am a freelance writer who reviews dildos from my bedroom. (One thing we have in common, at least, is that we both know a thing or two about balls.)

 

On the Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks

Available at Bookshop.org and Amazon.com

Oliver Sacks is one of my all-time favorite writers. He was a neurologist, and rose to fame for his gorgeously-written case studies compiled in many books, which examined the relationship between neurology and the human condition. I loved, for example, his book on how music affects the brain and vice-versa, Musicophilia, and his tales of visual and ocular disturbances in The Mind’s Eye.

On the Move is quite different, though: it’s one of his memoirs. It was published the year that he died, and shows him reflecting back on his life and the wisdom he’s accrued from it. In particular, this is one of the few Sacks books where he discusses in detail the fact of him being gay, and the ways that homophobia shaped the course of his life. But there are also lots of fun stories in here, tales of zooming across the country on a motorbike, playing chess on LSD, and falling in love for the first time. It’s a beautiful book, written by a beautiful man, and is one of the most intimate glimpses available into one of the great minds of the 20th century.

 

Laziness Does Not Exist by Devon Price, Ph.D.

Available at Bookshop.org and Amazon.com

I haven’t even actually finished reading this yet, but it’s already changed my life, so I feel compelled to mention it.

The provocative title of this book is indeed its central thesis. Laziness does not exist. Read that slowly, word by word, and notice the resistances and arguments that start coming up immediately in your mind. Do they sound like you? Or do they sound like your dad, your 4th-grade teacher, your first boss, or the disembodied booming voice of capitalism itself? More than likely, those voices aren’t coming from you – and more than likely, those voices are wrong.

In this book, social psychology professor Devon Price makes an incredibly persuasive argument for the idea that “lazy” people always have their reasons for being lazy, whether those are related to depression, anxiety, chronic illness, neurodivergence, trauma, burnout, or some combination thereof. But this book isn’t just theory – it’s packed with advice on how to materially change the circumstances of your life so that you will have more energy and take more initiative in the areas that actually matter, while also forgiving yourself for needing rest and making sure you get enough of it.

 

What were your favorite books you read this year?

How My DD/lg Kink Helps Me with Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy, and Vice-Versa

Kate Sloan

Two of the most important concepts I’ve ever learned in my life both go by an acronym: DD/lg, and IFS.

DD/lg, as you probably know if you’ve been reading this site for a while, stands for daddy dom/little girl roleplay, and it’s been a central part of my sexuality since I was about 23-24 (though there were certainly hints of those inclinations in my behavior and fantasies earlier than that). For those unaware, DD/lg is a specific type of D/s (dominance and submission) involving a nurturing, caretaking dynamic between a sub inhabiting a “little girl” role (that’s me!) and a dom inhabiting the role of a wise, nurturing caretaker (that’s my spouse!).

It has nothing to do with incest or (the way I do it) even the fantasy of incest – it’s rare that my partner and I roleplay as a literal daddy and daughter, since that “taboo” aspect is generally not what turns us on about it. Rather, the safety, caretaking, supportiveness and love involved in this dynamic both turn me on and lessen the factors that turn me off (anxiety, body image issues, depression, etc.), creating a psychological environment in which comfort and arousal can both abound.

IFS, on the other hand, stands for Internal Family Systems, a therapeutic modality for healing trauma. IFS is one of the key tools in my current therapist’s toolbox, which is how I got introduced to it – and I’m incredibly glad I did, because it’s truly one of the only things that has actually felt healing and helpful from all my ~16 years of therapy with various different practitioners.

Instead of encouraging you to “logic your way out of” depression, anxiety, and other trauma responses (as in cognitive-behavioral therapy) or to repeatedly relive your traumas aloud as if simply retelling a story could help you heal from it (as in standard talk therapy), IFS teaches you to see every uncomfortable emotion and outsized reaction as a “part” of yourself, who you can have a dialogue with, as if this “part” was an actual human being. In learning to do this work, you can learn to comfort your parts when they need it, instead of letting them flood you with emotion (or “blend with” you, in IFS parlance) whenever you get triggered.

Every “part” represents an earlier version of you who was frozen in time somewhere along the line due to trauma, so a lot of them talk/think/behave much more like children than like adults. But through IFS, you can learn to more and more often inhabit what the model refers to as the Self, with a capital S – the most evolved, integrated part of yourself, essentially the adult who can do the caretaking within your “internal family system” of traumatized childlike parts.

Because I’m a nerd, I’ve supplemented my IFS work in therapy by reading several books on IFS, so I can understand the model better and apply it more effectively in and out of therapy sessions. (The ones I would recommend are No Bad Parts and You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For, both by the creator of IFS, Dick Schwartz, as well as Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors by Janina Fisher, another IFS practitioner whose work is more explicitly trauma-focused.)

One of the many things I learned from these books is that dealing with so-called “protectors” or “managers” is a big part of the IFS process. These are parts who take on the role of protecting you from feeling the big, deep, scary feelings that can come up when an “exile” (a young part still holding onto old feelings of sadness, shame, rejection and/or aloneness) gets triggered. Protectors and managers might, for example, cause you to fly into a rage when you feel excluded, because anger feels easier and safer than those more vulnerable emotions; they might push you to drink, do drugs, or self-harm in order to block out the exile’s feelings; they might act as an “inner critic,” insulting you and judging you in the hopes that you won’t get hurt as badly if your confidence stays low.

Learning about protectors and managers has been transformative for me; I can recognize now when these types of parts are triggered in other people, which helps me have compassion for what they’re going through and why they might be acting in seemingly odd or irrational ways. But more importantly, I’ve learned a lot more about myself through this lens, like that the parts of me I’ve often hated most – the parts that can be judgmental, mean, and cold – are really just helpless young parts who started acting that way because they didn’t know how else to protect me from feeling sad, worthless and alone.

That being said, I noticed that many of the session transcripts in the IFS books showed a long process of gaining protectors’ trust, convincing them it’s safe to step down from their roles at least temporarily, before the therapist and client would be able to dialogue more directly with an “exile,” the type of young and vulnerable part they’re actually trying to heal. Dick Schwartz emphasizes again and again in his books that if you try to skip straight to a conversation with an exile before first establishing trust with the parts that protect it, havoc could ensue – such as the protectors forcibly taking over, thinking they have no other recourse. (This is why, for example, someone might storm out of therapy after a session or two, saying angrily that it’ll “never work” or it’s a “waste of time” – that’s a protector stepping in and using anger and “logic” as defensive tools to keep the person from feeling the deep, sad feelings of their exile parts.)

What I noticed, in my own IFS work, was that I didn’t have to work as hard as many other people do to keep my protectors mollified. Often I could just dialogue directly with my little exile, maybe after offering some brief reassurance to one or two protectors who came up. I would find myself thrown into the emotional world of a sad ~six-year-old girl, as if she was right there, just under the surface and eager to be engaged with, instead of locked away in some deeply-buried emotional basement chamber. And because I could commune with my exiles relatively quickly upon getting triggered, my healing work – both the in-the-moment process of soothing hard feelings within myself, and the larger-scale project of easing those burdens permanently – seemed to progress more quickly too.

But why were my parts allowing me such close contact with my exiles, without needing to jump through so many hoops and earn so many parts’ trust beforehand? I think it’s because of my experiences with DD/lg.

(I should clarify here that my therapist and I only started seriously diving into IFS work after about a year and a half of working together. Before that, we’d used IFS concepts here and there, but we didn’t really use the IFS process in earnest all that much until I became more interested in it earlier this year. So, I imagine that feeling comfortable with my therapist, and with accessing difficult feelings generally, has also made IFS easier for me than it might otherwise be. And protector parts may, in some sense, have observed the work I was putting into the process and been more willing to “step aside” because of that.)

I think part of why my protectors would “step down” more easily, allowing me more access to my exiles, was that they’d already seen me engage with younger, more vulnerable parts of myself in ways that were healthy, loving and supportive. Through years of doing DD/lg scenes – and just being in a DD/lg dynamic generally – I’d cultivated a strong sense of my “little self,” the version of myself I inhabit when I’m in “little space.” Dick Schwartz talks about a few different key types of intimacy in his books, including “part-to-part” and “part-to-Self” intimacy, and I think my exile has these types of intimacy not only with my partner (who has taken care of her in many different situations, both in and out of scenes) but also with me.

For instance, for years, when I’ve been having a hard time, I’ve sometimes talked to myself as if I was a parent taking care of a little girl, e.g. “Okay, little one, time to clean your room,” or, “We just have to get through this one work assignment and then we can rest, okay, bbgirl?” Over the years I’ve mostly seen this as me “domming myself,” especially at times when I either didn’t have a dom or my dom was physically not present. But in retrospect, I can see that through those interactions, I was cultivating a connection with younger parts of myself – and that in doing so, those parts may have learned to trust me more, and to trust me sooner, than they otherwise would have.

It’s not that I was always a competent adult in my relations with my little self. There were times when I self-harmed, drank too much, went out with people who treated me badly, etc., in an attempt to block out the seemingly unquellable wailing from within (“No one loves me,” “I’m worthless and stupid,” “There is something wrong with me,” and so on). Part of the work I’ve been doing in IFS is making amends with all my parts for the times I was not there for them in the ways they needed me to be. But I do think I had a better-than-average relationship with my exiles upon beginning IFS work, which has made the process feel easier and less scary.

I think one of the reasons I was drawn to DD/lg in the first place, even if I wasn’t consciously aware of it at the time, was that I had this infinitely sad little girl inside me and dreamed that someday, someone would show up and take care of her so well that it would take her pain away. She would no longer have to wonder if she was loveable, or worthy, or good, because someone wise and strong would tell her so. This is what Dick Schwartz calls the search for a “redeemer” – someone who will permanently end your misery and doubt, someone whose adoration finally proves your value in the world, someone who will love you so hard that it undoes all your trauma in one fell swoop.

But the fact is, that person doesn’t exist – even though my spouse is fucking amazing and loves me better and more deeply than I ever could have expected or hoped. No: the best caretaker for my parts, the one who understands them best, the one who loved them first and will love them last, the one who knows what they need and can give it to them day after day after day – that person is, has only ever been, and will only ever be me.

There are times when that feels hard, or impossible; there are times when that makes me angry or sad, because believing in the illusion of an external “redeemer” was easier and in some ways more comforting. But if DD/lg has taught me anything, it’s that patient love and care can be transformative, and can make more room in your life and mind for not only arousal and excitement, but also for comfort, safety, and a sense of wholeness. And just as I took care of myself in the early days of my DD/lg kink by putting a collar on myself and lovingly bossing myself into doing household tasks, so too can I take care of myself now, by being the “redeemer” I need and deserve.

Polyamory & Trauma Are a Tricky Combination, But These Resources Can Help

Kate Sloan
Sometimes my traumatized heart feels like a stormy sea.

In mid-2017, I started having weird episodes when my then-boyfriend would go on dates with one of his other partners. I’m using the phrase “weird episodes” here because I wasn’t sure what to call them at the time – they felt more panicky and distressing than mere jealousy, but did not manifest like actual panic attacks, as far as I could tell. During those episodes, I felt like I was dying, and like I was an ugly failure, and like I had just been informed by the love of my life that they didn’t care about me and were leaving. Those emotions felt entirely real and immediate to me, and made me utterly unable to function. They would often continue for hours or days.

I was very confused, and frankly, so was my partner. I had been polyamorous before, and this had never been an issue. Sure, I’d felt twinges of jealousy or irritation now and again when my partners would spend time with their other sweethearts, but those had always felt manageable, momentary, and easily dismissed. These new episodes were entirely different in character, and were much more debilitating to my relationship and my everyday functioning.

What I later learned, through tons of therapy, reading, journaling, chatting with polyam friends, and reflecting on my experiences, is that I am a trauma survivor and that these episodes were a trauma response. Childhood experiences of emotional abuse had amped up my nervous system and had made me hypersensitive to the threat of being unloved, unwanted, and not good enough. These feelings came up more acutely in that particular relationship because we were in a DD/lg dynamic, which brought my deepest desires to life but also brought the most vulnerable and helpless versions of me to the surface psychologically.

So when that boyfriend/daddy dom started dating someone else, without checking with me first and without taking the time to make sure both Adult Me and Little Girl Me felt okay with that decision and felt safe in our relationship, of course I started getting triggered all the time. I had deep-seated childhood trauma and was being re-traumatized repeatedly by the embodied sense that my “daddy” liked someone else better than me – a situation which wasn’t exactly helped by him constantly texting with his other partner while we were together, conveying more enthusiasm about that relationship than about ours, and telling me I was overreacting and harming him by being triggered.

Needless to say, that relationship didn’t last. But what it taught me was invaluable. The intensity of my reactions in that relationship eventually led me to seek out trauma therapy and start finally unpacking my issues. So, even though that boyfriend treated me badly, in a way I have to thank him for showing me exactly what parts of myself I needed to work on in order to someday become my truest, highest, most healed self.

 

Learning about the ways that trauma impacts polyamory has been completely transformative for me, because it has given me the tools to understand my past experiences and a road map toward happier ones. When I first entered the non-monogamy world around 2012, there was an almost libertarian-esque fervor about “taking responsibility for your own feelings.” The general prevailing attitude in the community, so far as I could tell, was that if you felt jealous, that was your issue to deal with, and your issue alone. There was very little nuance in the conversation and very little room for the idea that people’s emotional responses are not always the result of a toxic monogamy mindset and are not always fully within their control.

This can cause traumatized polyamorists to feel that they’re “broken” or “bad at polyamory” for having these responses. In many cases, they think that because they’ve been explicitly told that by judgmental partners who didn’t understand what was going on. Triggering a shame spiral in this way helps no one, and yet it was the customary approach most polyam people seemed to take when dating a traumatized person at that time.

So I’ve been delighted to see more discourse about trauma and polyamory over the past few years, and more resources popping up to explain these concepts to folks and help them have happier, healthier relationships regardless of their trauma history. I’ve gathered some of those resources below for you to peruse if you need ’em, or if you think my tale of woe sounds like something your partner or friend has gone through, or if you’re just curious. Whether you want to be non-monogamous yourself and have struggled with it due to trauma, or you just want to work through trauma that affects your relationship(s) regardless of monogamy status, I hope you find these resources as helpful as I have.

 

Workshops

• Bar none, the most helpful resource on this topic for me personally has been Clementine Morrigan’s “Trauma-Informed Polyamory” workshop. While Clementine does teach it in-person sometimes, it’s also available online as a 2.5-hour video (with optional captioning) that you can purchase, download, and watch. What’s really remarkable about this class is that it brings together a variety of modalities I think are crucial for understanding and overcoming trauma responses in polyamory. These include nervous system work (i.e. understanding how and why your nervous system gets triggered and how to get it back into a place of safety) and attachment theory (i.e. the ways that our relationships with our caregivers in childhood can affect the way we approach relationships for the rest of our lives). If you choose to only explore one resource on this list, I think it should be this one, unless something else I recommend here sounds like it would resonate more for you.

• While not trauma-focused, Reid Mihalko’s “Battling the 8-Armed Octopus of Jealousy” workshop was super helpful for me in learning more about jealousy triggers. There are a lot of different reasons why people experience jealousy, and it can be useful to understand your own triggers in this area so you can learn to work around them or create relational structures that prevent them from occurring as often. For example, I learned in this workshop that one of my biggest jealousy triggers is not feeling “special” to my partner, which is one reason why we have specific honorifics, kinks, and sex acts that we reserve only for each other and don’t do with other partners.

 

Books & Zines

• The book Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Non-Monogamy by Jessica Fern has gotten a lot of attention in polyamorous communities over the past year, and for good reason. It’s a must-have guide to navigating polyamory when you or a partner is attachment-injured, i.e. experienced some kind of trauma related to their caregivers or other attachment figures at some point which continued to affect the way they feel and behave in relationships. If you’ve routinely struggled with anxiety and/or avoidant behaviors in your relationships, you might be attachment-injured and this book might help you. The thing I love most about it is that it emphasizes finding relational security through the quality of the connection, rather than through extraneous things that provide the illusion of relational security, like monogamy or strict rules. You should read this if you’re an attachment-injured person who wants to be polyamorous, or if you have a partner or potential partner who fits that description; it’ll give you a lot of strategies for calming attachment-related inner turmoil and finding a feeling of safety in your relationship(s).

• In addition to their polyamory workshop (above), Clementine Morrigan also wrote a zine called Love Without Emergency: I Want This But I Feel Like I’m Going to Die about their personal experiences with these issues. (That link is to the physical version of the zine; click here if you’d rather buy a PDF copy.) It’s less of an instructional resource and more of a calming, validating one. Sometimes I leaf through my copy when my partner is on a date, to remind myself that 1) other people experience what I’m feeling and so I’m not alone, 2) my trauma does not make me broken, and 3) there are ways out of those terrible feelings.

• The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk is widely regarded as one of the best books on trauma, such that my partner and I frequently make jokes about the title when we need a moment of levity during a trauma episode (e.g. “damn, my body’s really keeping the score today, huh?!”). I haven’t had the emotional strength to read it yet, honestly, but I know that it’s largely about the ways that trauma manifests physically in the body, which is useful stuff to understand when navigating any kind of triggering situation, including those that can come up in polyamory.

• One of my all-time fave non-monogamy books in general is Building Open Relationships by Dr. Liz Powell. This one isn’t primarily trauma-focused but it does contain a lot of practical advice for navigating emotionally difficult situations that come up in polyamory, like what to do if you get anxious while your partner is out on a date or what level of detail you want to hear when your partner tells you about their dates.

• I haven’t yet had a chance to read Open Deeply: A Guide to Building Conscious, Compassionate Open Relationships by Kate Loree, but the author is trauma-savvy and it looks like it’s gonna be great.

 

Therapeutic Modalities

I’ve written before about how I used the filtering tools on PsychologyToday.com to find my therapist, by searching for practitioners who were LGBTQ-informed, kink-informed, and polyamory-informed, and who specialized in trauma. You can use that same method to find a therapist, or you can just voice a preference for particular modalities when searching for a therapist in whatever other ways are available to you. I’m no expert, but here are some modalities and strategies I’ve found helpful in healing from these issues:

• Internal Family Systems is a therapeutic model which emphasizes the existence of different “parts” of our personalities, which can be integrated through therapy. I never really used to believe in this stuff, but as I’ve been healing my trauma with the help of my therapist, I’ve noticed that my “inner child” is very wounded and needs a lot of love and compassion, which I had long been denying her by dismissing those sad, unloved feelings as stupid and irrational. Doing IFS work with my therapist is helping me reconnect with that inner child so I can “re-parent” her and help her feel safe, even when she experiences abandonment anxiety or insecurity because of my partner dating other people. If you’re interested in IFS but can’t afford/access therapy or just want to learn more, Dr. Tori Olds has an incredible series of videos about the basic principles of IFS; her work has helped me understand how this modality functions, not only emotionally but neurologically as well.

• “Somatic therapy” is a pretty broad term, as there are many therapeutic modalities that focus on the somatic, i.e. what our bodies are feeling and how that connects to our minds. However, I mention it here because it was something I specifically sought out when I wanted to heal from trauma, having noticed that modalities based on words and emotions (such as cognitive-behavioral therapy) weren’t easing my trauma responses at all. This, I learned, is because trauma is stored in parts of the mind that aren’t always consciously accessible to us, and because many people find that trauma manifests in their bodies, not just their minds. Doing somatic exercises with my therapist has been way more helpful for my trauma than CBT. Some examples of these exercises are locating the physical locus of anxiety within myself and having a “conversation” with it, or noticing while triggered that the bigness of my body means I’m an adult now and am not a powerless child anymore.

• Compassion and mindfulness. These are components of many therapeutic modalities, but I think they’re important enough to be mentioned specifically here. A lot of the work I’ve done on mindfulness, whether with the guidance of an expert or just in my own research and exploration, has been about accepting everything I’m feeling and experiencing at the present moment, including the things about myself that I normally dislike. Accepting yourself the way you are right now is a type of self-compassion, and self-compassion is vital for healing the anxieties and insecurities that can make polyamory feel impossible.

 

Other Resources

• I think reading polyamory blogs and forums can be super helpful when you’re feeling shitty about yourself for struggling with polyamory, because a lot of other people struggle with it too and have written about their struggles online. Kevin Patterson’s excellent blog Poly Role Models and the ever-insightful Poly.Land are great places to start.

• Sex educator and trauma expert Jimanekia Eborn hosts a podcast called Trauma Queen which is super validating to listen to as a trauma survivor. It’s not always focused on polyamory or relationships, but I think there’s a lot to learn from it in terms of trauma more generally.

• Jessica Fern, the author of the aforementioned book Polysecure, guested on my podcast and we had an interesting conversation about the monogamy mindset, nervous system regulation, healing from trauma, and more.

 

I’ll leave you with a metaphor that my therapist used in one of our sessions recently. Imagine you have a friend who went through a traumatic house fire as a kid. No one died or was seriously injured, but it was extremely scary and they’ve found fire very triggering ever since. But imagine that because of their ethics and values, they decided they wanted to become a firefighter. As they started training for the job, and then started fighting actual fires, what would you say to them when they kept getting triggered every day at work? What would be your advice for this person? Would you tell them to quit, or would you tell them to continue?

When my therapist asked me this, the answer seemed immediately obvious to me. “I’d tell them that the right decision would depend on whether or not they felt willing and able to put in the work to overcome that trauma,” I said. “I’d tell them they would have to think carefully about whether their values are more important than avoiding their trauma triggers. There’s no wrong answer, but they should think about it.”

My therapist said, “Exactly. And it’s the same with you and polyamory. Polyamory is very triggering for you. But you also know that you want to be polyamorous, because of your values and priorities. So the question becomes: Do you want it enough to put in the work of healing from your trauma so you can achieve your goal of being happily, healthily polyamorous?”

For the time being, I have decided that I do. So I will continue to revisit these resources, go to therapy, and work on myself. I will continue, at least for now, to fight those fires. I will continue to do the hard work I signed up for. Even when it hurts. Even when it feels impossible. Because I’m tired of being so damn scared all the time. I want to be brave and strong and healed, and I know that I can be. I just need help to get there – and, as this list has shown, there’s plenty of help to be found.

 

Do you have any resources to recommend on the subject of trauma’s interactions with polyamory? Feel free to share ’em in the comments, or let me know if you’ve enjoyed the ones I’ve recommended here. ❤️

12 Days of Girly Juice 2020: 6 Journal Entries

Kate Sloan

Ages ago, I read an article which mentioned that donating personal journals to historical archives can be really helpful to historians of the future, because it gives them a sense of what daily life was like for average people during a given timeframe. I thought about that almost every time I put pen to paper this year, because 2020 will certainly be written about in history books (to the extent that history books are still a thing in the future!).

Here are 6 entries I pulled from my journals this year. Hopefully next year we’ll have many more cheerful things to write about!

Jan. 31

Matt asked me recently to what degree I want to be surprised with a proposal. I said, “I don’t want to know exactly when it’s going to happen, but I do want to know when we are entering a period of life in which a proposal might occur.” They said, “So you want to know when I have a ring,” and I said yes. I love that we have, and have always had, these meta-conversations about important relationship milestones – it’s so different from the traditional Cosmopolitan model of relationships where you never talk about anything and always have to guess what your partner is thinking and feeling.

March 3rd

Everything is really scary right now because a pandemic called the coronavirus is spreading globally and there’s no vaccine for it yet. That sounds so dramatic and crazy but that is what’s happening. People are stockpiling flu meds and face masks and hand sanitizer, and some affected people are self-quarantining for weeks at a time. My immune system sucks so I feel like I will probably get it, but who knows. Currently I am coping by leaving the house as little as possible, washing my hands a lot, distracting myself with podcasts and movies, and drinking homemade martinis.

March 15

Existing in a pandemic reminds me of a feeling I get in the days and weeks following a really brutal breakup. You walk through the world in this daze, unable yet to process that your entire reality has shifted on its axis. Periodically you find minutes or hours of respite in the form of distraction, or perspective, or positive social connection, or just a random feeling of unusual optimism and shrugging resignation – but always, at some point, your mind skids squeakily like a record being scratched as the remembrance of your true situation hits you afresh. Being alive through COVID-19 is like that, except everyone is going through it now, all the time.

It’s fucking surreal how fast everything has changed. No aspect of life can be the same now. Nine days ago I saw fit to go to a crowded karaoke bar. Today I wouldn’t dream of such a thing. We are staying home and moving all our appointments online, or canceling them. We are afraid even to walk around the block or pick up groceries. We don’t know how long it’ll be until we can safely gather in crowds again.

May 13

I’m having a lot of episodes of… feeling triggered/having a trauma response/having an extreme nervous system response/not sure what else to call it… lately. Mostly triggered by stressful things in my relationship (we worked some things out yesterday so it’s okay now) but sometimes basically random. I’ve noticed that I often go into a shut-down dissociative mode when I feel like I’ve disappointed or upset someone I care about – the world slows down like I’ve done a lot of drugs, and the inside of my mind and body feel helplessly, scarily sluggish – and I think this must be related to all the many times my dad yelled at me until I cried, for both justifiable and unjustifiable reasons, when I was a kid/teen/young adult. I remember feeling so frustrated and sad that I could never seem to articulate myself well enough to provide a decent rebuttal to whatever he was bellowing at me – but of course I couldn’t; my nervous system was under attack and I was essentially paralyzed, with nothing to do but stand there and take it. Often I wouldn’t even be allowed to go to my room and cry in private to feel safe and calm again, because that would be perceived by him as “sulking” and he hated that. I think he mostly just hated the guilt of knowing he had upset me that much, after his obvious glee in hurting me had faded.

I asked Matt why they think all these trauma feelings and emotional flashbacks have been coming up so much for me lately – mostly ex-boyfriend stuff and dad stuff, I think – and they said it’s likely due to the stress of living through a global pandemic. Which, yes, that is true. I reached out to several therapists who specialize in trauma/PTSD as well as non-monogamy, because that is really what I’ve needed for years, I just haven’t been able to afford it. But now I finally can, and I want to work on myself and my dumb brain.

May 29th

Increasingly I feel like human civilization as I know it will end within my lifetime. Increasingly I find that tuning out the news and the world for periods of time is the only way I can even function. Increasingly I worry that dismantling capitalism is both the only solution to our major problems as a species and one of the only things we will never do.

July 17th

Matt went back home a couple days ago after living with me for 4 months of coronavirus lockdown. It was really hard for both of us. I cried a lot and they told me that my deep emotionality is a catch-22 because it makes the hard things extra hard but it also makes the good things extra good.

My days now are much more quiet, still, and unstructured without them here. I guess this is what quarantining alone would have been like. I’m not sure it’s all that great for my mental health but it’s also an opportunity to pursue any projects I feel like, read a lot of books, and play a lot of video games. I miss Matt but I like being alone, too. And I’m very very privileged and lucky to be able to do so safely, in such a hellish year.